


Parallel Sinking Ships

by paperstorm



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Anal Sex, Angst, Bottom Bucky Barnes, Brooklyn, Captain America: The First Avenger, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, M/M, Missing Scene, POV Bucky Barnes, Porn with Feelings, Pre-War, Sad Ending, they don't break up I promise but it's still sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-19
Updated: 2020-04-19
Packaged: 2021-03-02 04:14:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23738932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperstorm/pseuds/paperstorm
Summary: Steve isn’t asleep, Bucky can tell because he knows that body so intimately, but he pretends he is when Bucky comes in. Maybe Bucky deserved that. Maybe he should’ve ditched the girls and brought Steve home the minute Steve saw a recruitment poster and the evening went sour. Maybe he should have been more understanding, of why Steve wants so badly to be joining Bucky on that boat in less than 12 hours. Maybe he should admit that he didn’t enlist. Maybe, maybe, maybe. So many of them, piling up in the corners of the room and shrinking it, and there’s so little time left.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 35
Kudos: 158





	Parallel Sinking Ships

**Author's Note:**

> None of us really need angst or sadness right now and yet my brain wouldn't let this idea go until I wrote it.
> 
> Title is from the lyric _we're drifting apart, we're parallel sinking ships, I'm anxiously reaching out but I'm losing my grip_ from one of my absolute favorite songs, Arcadia by The Kite String Tangle.

Bucky dances with them both, after Steve craps out on their date. He walks them both home after. He kisses them both on the cheek, as they simper mostly meaningless platitudes about how brave he is, and how handsome in his uniform. He hopes, at least, the latter is true. He doesn’t feel brave. It wasn’t his choice, anyway, to do what he’s about to in the morning. He isn’t going to tell Steve that.  
  
Steve is in bed by the time Bucky gets home. Curled up under the sheet, knees tucked up, shoulders curved inward, facing the peeling wallpaper. He isn’t asleep, Bucky can tell because he knows that body so intimately, but he pretends he is when Bucky comes in. Maybe Bucky deserved that. Maybe he should’ve ditched the girls and brought Steve home the minute Steve saw a recruitment poster and the evening went sour. Maybe he should have been more understanding, of why Steve wants so badly to be joining Bucky on that boat in less than 12 hours. Maybe he should admit that he didn’t enlist. Maybe, maybe, maybe. So many of them, piling up in the corners of the room and shrinking it, and there’s so little time left.  
  
Bucky is careful as he removes his uniform. Folds it precisely, as he was taught, so it won’t be creased in the morning. It’s the finest piece of clothing he’s had for years. Maybe ever, even though his parents didn’t want for money, when he was a boy, before he moved in with Steve. Bucky doesn’t feel worthy of it. He feels like it dwarfs him, when he wears it, even though it’s been perfectly tailored to the set of his shoulders and the cut of his hips. He feels like a child playing dress-up, stomping around the house in their father’s coat and shoes, a diminutive frame in a costume that represents the man they might be, one day, but aren’t yet. Steve would be worthy of it. But the army sure ain’t worthy of Steve.  
  
He sets the hat on top of the neat pile on the dresser. Down to his shorts and undershirt, he spends a few minutes in the washroom. Cleans his face and his teeth, purposeful not to look too long at his own reflection in the cracked mirror. He’s not sure why he can’t face it, just now, but he can’t, so he doesn’t.  
  
Steve is resolute, in his farce, when Bucky re-enters the bedroom. Eyes closed, breaths coming slow and even, limbs immobile. Bucky should just crawl in behind him, like he would any other night. Curl around him, wrap his arm around Steve’s middle to keep him close. Except this isn’t any other night. It could be, Bucky understands with death’s fingers gripping around his ribcage, their very last night. Steve would scream at him, if Bucky said that out loud. But it’s the truth, and it sits heavy like a stone between them anyway. He sits, on the edge of the mattress. It dips, and Steve’s body shifts with it, and his eyelids twitch.  
  
Bucky reaches out, and then hesitates, pulling his fingers into a fist that hovers over Steve’s hip. It’s a moment, before he can let it fall, resting the side of his hand on Steve. “I know you aren’t asleep,” Bucky says.  
  
“Did you fuck her?” Steve asks, not bothering to pretend anymore but still not opening his eyes.  
  
It aches in Bucky’s chest that Steve even has to ask. He doesn’t, really. He knows Bucky didn’t. Wouldn’t. He’s angry, and he’s desperately sad, and Bucky understands it all too well. He’d give anything, anything in the world, to not understand exactly how Steve feels right now. But he does.  
  
“Of course not,” he says softly.  
  
“You could’ve. Protestant girls are fast.”  
  
“Probably,” Bucky agrees, frowning sadly because Steve doesn’t usually say things like that. Other guys do, and Steve always bristles and winds up in a sour mood about it. “But I didn’t want to.”  
  
“Why not?”  
  
He exhales slowly. It feels like lifting medicine balls off his shoulders. “Is this … the conversation you really want to have? Tonight?”  
  
Steve doesn’t answer. He does move; his face turned into the pillow, so he doesn’t have to face the world. Bucky wishes he really didn’t have to. Wishes he could wrap Steve up in a blanket and keep him away from everything. Keep Steve all to himself. Keep him forever.  
  
Bucky leans over, kisses Steve’s hip through the sheet. “I love you,” he whispers.  
  
“Don’t,” Steve whispers back.  
  
“It’s true,” Bucky says, with a shrug that Steve can’t see. “You don’t have to like it.”  
  
Finally Steve sits up. His face is red and his eyes shine in the low light from the streetlamps outside. Fiercely beautiful, as he always is, even in tragedy. He has so little, in this world. His family is gone, and his body constantly fails him, and everyone in this damn city constantly overlooks him. Bucky loathes, with fire in his belly, being just one more thing that has to let Steve down. That he has to leave Steve alone.  
  
“It’ll be over sooner than you think,” Bucky tells him. “It’s been years already, how much longer could it last?”  
  
A useless platitude, like the kind his dates had offered earlier. He regrets the words the moment they pass his lips.  
  
“I should be going with you,” Steve says angrily.  
  
“I’m happy you’re not.”  
  
“I should be going with you!” Steve shouts. He grabs the pillow next to him and hurls it across the room. It bounces off the wall and lands, with a defeated thump, on the floor.  
  
“Well, you can’t.” Bucky keeps his voice level, even though he wants to shout too. “And thank God for that.”  
  
“Fuck you.”  
  
“It’s true,” Bucky repeats, about something else, this time, but both things Steve needs to hear, even if they boil his blood. “You don’t think they kept you out just because they’re against you, I know you’re not that dumb. There’s reasons for those regulations. What if you have an asthma attack in the middle of a raid? What good are you to anyone if you drop dead in the trenches of natural causes? At least here you can …”  
  
“If you say collect scrap metal I’m gonna – ”  
  
“Something else, then!” Bucky cries. He hates that he let Steve goad him into a fight, on their last night together. But maybe Steve is hurting even more than Bucky realized, and maybe this is all he can do. Maybe saying a proper _goodbye_ instead would hurt too much. “If that’s not good enough for you then join a charity, or volunteer to work at the war office!”  
  
“While you’re over there getting shot at?”  
  
“Yes.” Bucky shakes his head, mouth hanging open for a moment, before he sniffs and snaps it back shut. He squeezes his fingers around each other, blunt nails digging into the skin. To admit how terrified he is, right now, would be worse than the feeling itself.  
  
“It’s a war, Bucky! You’re not going off to summer camp! How can I …”  
  
He trails off, despairing. “What?” Bucky prompts. Bile rises in the back of his throat, burns it.  
  
“How can I protect you if I’m not there?” A tear spills over the red rims of Steve’s eye, slides down his cheek.  
  
Bucky can’t look at it. Not without tears stinging in his eyes, too. “That’s why you have to stay.”  
  
“What does that mean?”  
  
“I can’t protect you on a battlefield. You have to stay here, so I know you’ll be safe,” Bucky tells his hands, still folded violently in his lap. “So I know you’ll be here when I come back. I know that’s selfish, but I … I don’t think I could do this, if I didn’t know you were here waiting for me to come home to.”  
  
It’s as close as he’s coming, to admitting the truth. It feels treacherous anyway, and it’s not even everything he should be saying. Bucky doesn’t wait for Steve’s answer. He gets up, and walks on numb feet out of the room.  
  
Perhaps only to torture himself, he wanders their small apartment. Takes in the rusty sink in the kitchen, the floral pattern on the curtains, the green tartan of the sofa. It was never very comfortable, even the day they moved in. But they’ve lived on it. They’ve read together, Bucky’s feet up on the coffee table and Steve’s head in his lap. They’ve fought on it, Bucky collapsing down onto it with his head in his hands because Steve is upset over some injustice and Bucky wishes he could make it right, but can’t. Selfishly, he wishes Steve wouldn’t care so much about these things, because none of the people he stands up for would ever care that much about Steve in return. They’ve loved on that couch, curled up together so tightly because it wasn’t quite big enough for both of them, found absolution in each other’s mouths, with roaming hands and rutting hips.  
  
He blinks, and looks away from it. He can almost see them. The ghosts of four or five years ago. He’s a little skinnier, jaw a little less sharp. Steve’s face is freckled; golden, just like his heart. They struggle to pay the bills and sometimes they run out of hot water before both of them have had a chance to shower and they have to hide their love away to keep it safe from people who would want to hurt them if they knew, but despite all that, they’re _happy_. It aches and it aches and it aches in Bucky’s chest to think of how much he took it for granted, how many times he should have told Steve he loved him but didn’t, how likely it is that they’ll never have that again. Bucky’s not as simple as he’s been pretending. He doesn’t believe the advertisements, the campaigns that promise they’ll be gone six months and home as heroes by Christmas. That’s what they said last time, and millions never came home.  
  
He hopes, if that’s what comes to be, Steve will find somebody. A girl who can see past his size and his ailments, like so many never could. Someone who makes him laugh when he’s angry, someone who appreciates his passion. Give him a family, like Bucky can’t. He’d happily go to his death at the hands of the Germans if he could know, for sure, that Steve would move on and find peace. But Steve’s too stubborn.  
  
The floorboards creak behind him. Steve is in the doorway, cotton shorts and a bare chest. His blond hair falls over his rumpled forehead, into his eyes. He looks unspeakably sad. Bucky’s stomach swoops.  
  
“I’m sorry,” he whispers.  
  
Bucky shakes his head so quickly it leaves a crick in his neck. “It’s not your fault. I don’t know how to handle this either.”  
  
Steve steps toward him, tentative, and then all at once the dam breaks and he’s rushing over and flinging himself at Bucky. Bucky catches him, wraps his arms tight around Steve’s waist and lifts him off the floor.  
  
“I love you so much,” Steve breathes, face pressed into Bucky’s neck, arms gripping tight around his shoulders.  
  
Bucky stumbles with him to the couch, collapses down on it, and Steve scrambles to end up curled in Bucky’s lap. He makes a show, sometimes, of hating his size. Other times, he just snuggles right in and lets Bucky be larger. This is one of those times.  
  
“I love you, too.” Bucky buries his nose in Steve’s soft hair, soap and clean sweat in his nostrils. “I’ll miss you every minute.”  
  
“Don’t you dare get yourself killed.”  
  
They both know it’s not a promise Bucky can make, so it doesn’t matter that it’s a lie when he says, “I won’t.”  
  
Bucky puts a bent finger underneath Steve’s chin, lifts his face up. His cheeks are streaked with tears. He looks so small, and broken, and Bucky hates being the cause of it so much it makes him feel sick. He presses his lips to Steve’s slowly, trying to communicate in a gentle kiss how sorry he is. Steve opens up for him, lets Bucky slide his tongue inside to taste him, and then grows hungry with it, deepening the slide of their mouths together. Trying to consume him, or maybe to climb right inside him, to vibrate their bodies into one so they never have to be apart.  
  
If he lives through this, Bucky decides, he’s done hiding. He’s finished with all of it, with the lies to his parents, with the stories he spins to his coworkers about dames he spent the night with, the half-truths they tell to their neighbors and landlord about sharing an apartment to save money. He loves the man in his lap too much to lock it away anymore. He’s loved Steve since the beginning of time, he figures, so maybe it’s left cracks in the universe, that they keep it hidden. If he can’t be with Steve safely in Brooklyn, then Brooklyn doesn’t deserve them. He’ll buy them a small farm, somewhere upstate where there’s no one around for miles. He’ll have Steve all to himself, surrounded by golden fields and endless summer skies.  
  
Steve rocks into him, yet more desperation buzzing between them, hard against Bucky’s hip when he presses in closer.  
  
“Please,” Bucky hears himself whimper, gripping Steve’s hip in his fingers so hard it’ll bruise, the other hand tangled in his hair. He feels about to burst out of his skin, spinning off into the ether and needing Steve to ground him, like he always has.  
  
“Whatever you want,” Steve says to him, breathless. “Anything.”  
  
“You, honey,” Bucky says. He cups Steve’s damp cheek and brings him in for another kiss, even more heartfelt than before. “Just want you. For every second I have left. Want you to make me feel it, leave me …”  
  
“Leave you what?” Steve pushes gently, kissing all over Bucky’s face. His cheeks, his eyelids, the bridge of his nose. Steve’s is crooked; broken too many times to heal properly. Bucky knows every inch of him. Every scar, ever freckle. Could map them out, tell each of them like a story. He’s never known anything the way he knows Steve.  
  
Bucky can’t finish the sentence he’d begun. Can’t say out loud that he wants to be bruised tomorrow, and sore, limping off to the base with physical remnants of their last night together still on him. Wants it to hurt, so it lasts, so he can keep Steve with him as long as possible, as he crosses the ocean.  
  
Steve seems to understand anyway. Sometimes Bucky thinks they really can read each other’s minds, like his mother always used to joke about. Steve climbs up off him, takes Bucky’s hand and pulls him up, pulls him off to the bedroom. _Their_ bedroom. It won’t be anymore, come the morning.  
  
He opens Bucky up with insistent fingers and kisses to his hipbones, soft words spoken against Bucky’s skin that leave goose-bumped flesh in their wake. There are times when Steve takes forever, with his fingers pressing into Bucky, warmth and pressure and loving strokes along that spot that puts fireworks behind his eyes. This time Bucky hurries him, urges Steve to slick himself up and get inside maybe a little faster than he should, but if it’s quick, he figures, maybe they can sleep for an hour and then wake up and do it all over again. Maybe this doesn’t have to be the last time.  
  
It burns when Steve slides into him, and Bucky feels wild with it, back arching, moaning into Steve’s ear, a delicious ache lighting him up everywhere. Why, he wonders miserably, did they never fully explore the way Bucky likes it a little when it hurts? They’d have time, he thought. He always thought they had so much time. Steve kisses him through it, refusing to rush even as Bucky begs for it. When he moves, its slower than Bucky wants, but he gets louder, so much more shameless, and Steve looks pained but he gives in, fucking Bucky quick and rough and hard enough that he’s shouting and needing to grip the bars of the headboard to keep from sliding into it.  
  
“I love you,” Steve tells him, between soft grunts, bracing on his elbows and kissing Bucky so roughly Bucky tastes blood. “Always, always.”  
  
“So fucking much, babydoll,” Bucky rasps, holding Steve close to him, rocking down against him, needing it harder, deeper, needing Steve inside him as far as he can get. Needing him to stay there forever.  
  
When they sleep, it’s wrapped around each other, legs tangled and arms holding tightly, Bucky’s face buried in Steve’s neck and Steve’s nose in his messy curls. He holds Bucky so closely, so tightly to his chest, and Bucky wishes he could burrow in and never, ever come back out. He kept expecting to cry, had been expecting it all night, but the tears never come.  
  
In the morning, Steve pretends to be asleep again. He isn’t, Bucky can tell again that he isn’t, but he stays motionless as Bucky showers and dresses and picks up the small bag he’d packed the day before. This time, Bucky doesn’t call him on it. If Steve can’t bring himself to utter the words they’d have to say, if he kissed Bucky at the door and sent him on his way, then Bucky doesn’t want to hear them. Maybe, just maybe, if they never say it, then they’ll never really have to. Bucky had been lying, when he’d promised the war would be over soon and he’d be right back here with Steve before they knew it, but maybe he’ll end up being right anyway. It’s the hope he leaves with, as he takes one last look around the place that’s become their home, their sanctuary, and shuts the door behind him.  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Come talk to me [on tumblr](http://paper-storm.tumblr.com/) [or twitter](https://twitter.com/turningthedials) if you want!


End file.
